I just got back to Rio this morning after a long weekend in Maringá, the city where I did my exchange year in high school. The third-largest city in the southern state of Paraná, Maringá is a fascinating little slice of life in the interior of Brazil. On the one hand it is painfully provincial, a place that thrives on social column gossip and make out sessions in the gas station parking lot. On the other, Maringá it is cosmopolitan in its own right with significant Japanese, Lebanese, Italian, German, and Russian immigrant communities adding small but welcome doses of worldliness to the population of 400,000.
The region is totally dominated by agriculture – fields of sugarcane, coffee, corn, and soybeans create cross-hatched patterns in the landscape, interrupted occasionally by square expanses of the reddest dirt you can imagine, already tilled and waiting to be planted. Donkey carts and tractors creep along the highway while mini cars and pickups zoom past, weaving through imaginary lanes and making for a uniquely crazy kind of traffic.
Nicknamed the “Texas of Brazil”, Maringá certainly knows how to play the part. People wear ranch boots and Wranglers, dance 2-step, and go cow tipping when intoxicated. They also have the hick accent down pat, butchering an otherwise melodic, smooth language with the dreaded “American R”. That’s right, the gringo ‘r’ we English-speakers so notoriously put in the place of a rolled, romantic trill. You know the sound I’m talking about, the kind of ‘r’ that makes you sound like a slack-jawed idiot. Well it’s all over the place in Maringá and I have to monitor my speech to avoid contamination. The accent is easier to pick up than a Georgia drawl when you’re drunk.
So what happens if you are a young person in Maringá and, for some bizarre reason, aren’t a junior agronomist and don’t rock out to the Portuguese-language remake of Billy Ray Cyrus’ smash hit “Achy Breaky Heart”? Basically you smoke as much pot as humanly possible and adopt fragments of angsty, mid-90’s American alterna-culture as your own.
When I first moved to Maringá in 1997, I was blown away by how much my friends loved alternative rock. Everybody I knew listened to The Pixies, Superchunk, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Neil Young. Somehow word got out to these bands because most have played concerts in Maringá, many times the only Brazilian city in a tour of South America. Kids in Maringá wear Converse, ride longboards, and drink copious amounts of beer at the SK8 Bar (pronounced skay-chee barrrrrrr), the outdoor haunt where even now, 8 years later, I drive by and recognize tons of familiar faces.
Did I mention that people smoke a *lot* of weed? Maringá puts New Mexico to shame when it comes to pot consumption. These rural Brazilians really know how to make getting stoned the primary activity of each and every day. Most of the marijuana comes from Paraguay and is packaged in neat little compressed bricks that you can buy in 5-gram increments from guys that live on the other side of the railroad tracks. It’s not quite as nasty as Mexican dirt weed, but definitely a far cry from the hydroponic, crystal-encrusted plants you come across in California. In Maringá everybody smokes joints rolled with Spanish papers, preferably while cruising around the city in a compact car packed with 5 or 6 close friends. Smoking and driving, referred to as a barca, was definitely the main form of weekend entertainment during my exchange year.
It's been nearly 8 years since I first went to Maringá, and over 4 since the last time I went back to visit. Now that I've gained a bit of perspective on my experiences there, three things struck me over the weekend:
1. I have gotten older and my frame of reference has changed. I felt like an adult going back to visit elementary school. Everything seemed *so* small, so provincial, so simple to manage. I used to think that Maringá was this huge city full of pedestrians and busy shops, and that it took forever to go from one side of town to the other. Now that Rio de Janeiro is my "home" in Brazil, I've gotten used to an entirely different rhythm of life. A 30-minute bus ride is short, a 40-minute walk is right next door, and anything less than gridlocked traffic is no problem.
2. Everyone else has gotten older, too. All of my alt-rock skater friends are now fatter, wrinklier, balder, married, and/or have kids. (Haven't cut back on the pot smoking, though!) People are slowly settling down, settling in for a good 50 years of small town life with small town aspirations. There is something about places like Maringá and Belen (NM), and even Albuquerque, that if you don't get out before you're 25 you basically get sucked in for the long haul.
3. Maringá, the place that once felt so much like home I had to be dragged away crying, is no longer home. The minute I stepped off the bus I was hit with a pang of homesickness, something I haven't felt yet since leaving Austin. I desperately wanted to turn around and come back to the casa rosa in Rio, or to my sunny apartment on Lamar Blvd. Home seems to be a recurring theme these days, and I've actually been writing quite a bit about what "home" is for me at this particular point in life.
Overall my trip back to Maringá was good. Difficult and exasperating at times, but definitely worth it to catch up with old friends and my host family. More details to follow in the next posts...
Love you all.
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